Truth or Tribe: How In-group Favoritism Prioritize Facts in Persona Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Social simulation and multi-agent debate
Abstract (arXiv)
In-group favoritism refers to the phenomena of favoring members of one's in-group over out-group members and is widely observed in numerous social cooperative behaviors. Recently, in-group favoritism biases have also been identified in generative language models. However, whether the in-group favoritism exists when persona agents are faced with contradicting information (e.g., misinformation), and how to mitigate the adverse effects of in-group favoritism biases in persona agents have been understudied. To address these problems, we propose a Truth or Tribe simulation framework to study the agent cooperation within the spread of contradicting information through a triadic interaction paradigm, and conduct controlled trials to evaluate the primary moderating factors. Extensive results showcase that persona agents display strong in-group favoritism, accepting incorrect answers from identity-similar peers at much higher rates than from dissimilar peers. In-group favoritism continues to emerge in defeasible reasoning contexts where no absolute truth exists, and it intensifies as cognitive complexity increases. Furthermore, three intervention strategies--Identity-Blind Instruction, Structured Counterfactual Reasoning, and Heterogeneous Perspective Ensemble--are proposed to mitigate the in-group favoritism.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 27 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 May 2026.
Builds on
27 of 54 references.
Closest ancestors · 9
Same direction, newest first
- 2025From Single to Societal: Analyzing Persona-Induced Bias in Multi-Agent Interactions14 Nov
- 2025AgentSociety: Large-Scale Simulation of LLM-Driven Generative Agents Advances Understanding of Human Behaviors and Society12 Feb
- 2024GenSim: A General Social Simulation Platform with Large Language Model based Agents6 Oct
- 2024From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents28 Apr
- 2023Simulating Opinion Dynamics with Networks of LLM-based Agents16 Nov
- 2023EconAgent: Large Language Model-Empowered Agents for Simulating Macroeconomic Activities16 Oct
- 2023Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing16 Oct
- 2023Exploring Collaboration Mechanisms for LLM Agents: A Social Psychology View3 Oct
- 2023Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate30 May
Other references · 18
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- 2022Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Themcited by 1,767
- 2024MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmarkcited by 1,758
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- 2023Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Modelscited by 988
- 2022Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluationscited by 805
- 2023AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Modelscited by 701
6 more
- 2021BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answeringcited by 683
- 2024Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalizationcited by 203
- 2022Thinking Fast and Slow in Large Language Modelscited by 136
- 2023Generative Language Models Exhibit Social Identity Biasescited by 107
- 2024Cognitive Biases in Large Language Models: A Survey and Mitigation Experimentscited by 20
- 2024Persona Setting Pitfall: Persistent Outgroup Biases in Large Language Models Arising from Social Identity Adoptioncited by 9
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
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- 2024Exploring Prosocial Irrationality for LLM Agents: A Social Cognition View
- 2025Validating Generative Agent-Based Models of Social Norm Enforcement: From Replication to Novel Predictions
- 2026PICon: A Multi-Turn Interrogation Framework for Evaluating Persona Agent Consistency
- 2026Why LLM Agents Favor Their Group: Stakes, Observed Norms, and Reputation
- 2025neuralFOMO: Can LLMs Handle Being Second Best? Measuring Envy-Like Preferences in Multi-Agent Settings